the review
Off with
Sunday, 13 February, 2011
everyone’s heads!
By Urooj Zia
tired,” she yawned. Then she turned around and saw the weirdest thing: a bearded little rabbit in a high shalwar hopped past her carrying an effigy of cupid. He looked like he was in a hurry, and Aisha decided to follow him. The rabbit went into an underground tunnel. Aisha peeped over the edge, lost her balance, and fell in. After what seemed like ages, she landed in a cave. Her ears were ringing, and all she could hear was a muddle of words in her head: “Valentine’s Day is going to be big this year. Even the BUSM has jumped on to the bandwagon. And where the BUSM goes, crowds follow.” In the cave, many men were gathered around a large table – a BUSM meeting was in session. Aisha finally spotted the little bearded rabbit. He was surrounded by hundreds of little carbon copies of him. “Wow, you guys do breed a lot, don’t you,” she exclaimed, and was told that contraceptives were haraam, and so was blasphemy. “We will protest Valentine’s Day and protect Namoos-e-Risalat,” the rabbit chanted. The question that Aisha was dying to ask, however, was simple: what on earth does Valentine’s Day have to do with Namoos-eRisalat? She wondered how the gross commercialisation of what should be extremely private emotions could possibly affect the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad (PBUH). That’s when a loud cheer from the table startled Aisha. The BUSM had had a collective brainwave! Everyone was talking together. The rabbits were hopping excitedly. Not enough death sentences are being carried out in Pakistan, they said. And all these liberal-fahascists have gone on a [verbal] rampage against the sentencing of Aasia Bibi. Let’s feed the death machine by finding more low-profile victims for the vile blasphemy laws. And who’s more low-profile than street children and young men who sell artificially-scented flowers and cheesy heartshaped balloons at traffic signals! Or shop-
Chaucer’s ‘Parlement of Foules’. Off with everyone’s heads! Yalla!” Aisha’s hair turned white in fear and she woke up with a start. Her pretty little book was lying beside her. It was only a nightmare, she thought, sighing with
keepers who stock up on cheesier, glittery heart- and roseshaped Valentine’s Day cards. Blasphemers, all of them! Off with their heads! Also, now that any liberal-fahascist ideas that the government might have had about amending the blasphemy laws in accordance with the accepted tenets of criminal law have been shelved, a new topic is needed to protest against. For protest we must, or the several hundred people who depend on the effigy- and American, Indian and Israeli flag-making industry will be rendered jobless! In one go, therefore, the BUSM had not only ensured an endless supply of heads for the executioner’s axe, they were also doing a great service to the economy by keeping [at least one] industry running. The group patted themselves on the back for a wellthought-out plan. Pure genius. “Moreover,” the people around the table said, “supporting heretics also makes one a heretic. So of course, commemorating a day that celebrates the various heretic Valentines of Rome, Terni and Africa, and their dubious contributions to love makes everyone involved with Valentine’s Day in Pakistan a heretic. On that note, everyone who loves Geoffrey Chaucer should also be shot; for Wikipedia says that the first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in
relief. It’s not that the Valentine’s Day is not an utter farce. By blatantly commercialising private moments, the modern version of Valentine’s Day is an embodiment of everything that is vile about capitalism. The only people who profit are the card and balloon producers; and perhaps jewellery store owners. My editor asked me to ‘write something’ for or about Valentine’s Day. While I threw up a little in my mouth, he relented a little. “Satirise it,” he ordered. But how does one satirise a farce? For all I know, my partner and I will be stuck at work on February 14. And honestly, I will not think that he loves me any less if he does not get me the customary flowers, chocolates, nauseatingly-cheesy cards and balloons for Valentine’s Day. A person is no less dead if she or he does not get a funeral! Okay, that was a macabre comparison, but you get the point, right? Either way, if religiocrats are so desperate to protest, they might want to look into issues that are a tad more substantial – such as, maybe, rape and the seeming rise in the number of incidents of child molestation in the country. Contrary to their claims, Valentine’s Day is not going to “push” the country towards secularism. One wishes, but wishes aren’t unicorns, or even horses. As for the rest of you, go ahead and paint the town red by all means, so to speak. In a country mired in violence, one should be thankful that the ‘red’ in this case is merely proverbial, or at the most, ink. Stay away from gangs of crazy-looking bearded men in high shalwars, though.
If religiocrats are so desperate to protest, they might want to look into issues that are a tad more substantial – such as, maybe, rape and the seeming rise in the number of incidents of child molestation in the country
2 A crime of compassion 3 Female quartet displays diverse range
A
isha was reading a book. It had a pretty cover, with little hearts surrounded by roses. Valentine’s Day was just around the corner and all her friends seemed to be caught up in the unfortunate, commercialised fad. Couples-in-love – unmarried ones, that is (or maybe that was self-explanatory) – claimed , that the biggest problem that they face in this country is lack of privacy. Everyone and their aunt, they told her, was looking over the shoulder, lest these young ones, devoid of morals and sex education, indulge in dirty, haraam activities... like holding hands. At Sea View in Karachi, overzealous policemen roam the beach after-hours – not to make it safe for people, but to ‘catch couples’. Unfortunate ones who are thus spotted are then endlessly harassed. Many are allowed to leave after a bribe is extracted out of them. These are the fortunate ones. As for the rest, there are hair-raising tales of young girls being dragged to police stations and raped. So much for upholding the law! Journalists with cameras prowl parks and gardens all over the country, hoping to surreptitiously catch young people ‘in the act’, making one wonder if they really don’t have more worthwhile assignments. Perhaps they should invest in better internet connections at home, Aisha thought. And of course, there were random gangs of goons who went around looking for unwitting couples to either harass them or worse. Aisha remembered February 14 from her first semester at the University of Karachi. She was sitting with a group outside their department building, waiting for the next class to begin, when a gang of crazyeyed, knife-wielding Bearded Utang-shalwar Mahaaz (BUSM) came rushing in, and ordered the women to “sit separately”. Why, she asked, for she was truly bewildered. What followed was a classic introduction to the nightmare that post-Zia campus politics has become in Pakistan. The crazies descended on the men who were sitting with the group, held knives at their throats, and told them that if “the Western-minded pant-shirt waali didn’t shut up immediately”, their blood would be on her hands. “This is a Muslim country! Respect our culture,” the BUSM goons growled before leaving. And that was that. Lesson learned. Aisha returned to her book. “I’m so
the review
A crime of
D Geared towards a wider audience, the talk was meant to launch the ‘Charter for Compassion’ in Pakistan
By Anum Yousaf
ear reader, if I asked you, to imagine an ‘advocate of religion’ your well-trained brain would probably conjure up the image of a bearded wide-eyed spittlespreading slogan-shouting man who is impervious to religion and alien to logic. You would never think that the advocate of religion would be a short-haired ash-blonde softspoken woman, who is a rebel ex-nun and a current academic conducting a crusade for the cause of compassion. And she is the widely known historian of religion, Karen Armstrong, who is recently touring Pakistan to establish the Pakistani chapter of the Charter for Compassion, which has 150 chapters around the world. She visited the Lahore University of Management Sciences on Feb. 4, to deliver a lecture on the issue of making space for religion in the public sphere and how religion can play a part in making the world a more compassionate place. And here we thought all religion could teach people was to kill others and kill others some more. Mr Amin Hashwani joined her as a speaker in this event organised by the Lahore chapter of the international student society AIESEC. He told the audience how the Charter for Compassion had joined hands with the Rafi Peer Theatre, The Citizens’ Foundation and the OUP in Pakistan to undertake humanistic projects that furthered the cause of this international commitment. He said they already had over 1400 commitments and invited the public to join this movement as it could be a first step towards a wider change. Contrary to popular misconception, religious study is a vibrant and thriving part of the modern secular university. And if we have the Dawkins and Dennett’s ilk, we also have people like Karen Armstrong who have made a major contribution, academic and non-academic, to understanding how religion can function in an increasingly fractured society. Her views are
well-known for their accessibility and are not weighed down by turgid intellectual considerations. She is one of the few academics who is not ensconced in her ivory tower. While she has been critiqued for being simplistic and un-nuanced, it cannot be denied that she has made theology and religious discourse palatable for a very wide audience. She spoke about her new books “12 steps to a compassionate life” and “Letter to Pakistan”. Both of them have been written to further the cause of the Charter for Compassion. That project started when Armstrong won the TED award and she was given the opportunity to head a project of her choice. She then chose this Charter which wants to make compassion and understanding a potent force in the world of today and given a voice to the “silent majority against extremism and hate”. She and other leading thinkers, who worked on it, intended it to transcend ideological and religious boundaries. She said that as s a basic starting principle, they want to realistically and practically implement the golden rule i.e. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” into the difficult conditions of the 21st century. She also stressed since the world is now a global democracy of sorts, it is very important for everybody’s voice to be heard and not just of the powerful and privileged and this initiative is a small step in that direction. A major part of her talk was devoted to explaining how the golden rule was embedded in all religious tradition and she drew on examples from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism and even ancient Greek religion. One could see that she was trying to demonstrate how finding a simple common thread in these religious traditions could help in fashioning a somewhat transcendent movement which diverse people can find themselves interested in. She stressed the need for reclaiming the true meaning of compassion. She said it’s the sign of the times of how the semantics of that particular world have evolved over time. She said that in a Dutch translation, the word had been translated as ‘pity’ which couldn’t be farther from its true meaning which exhorts people to endure with others and feel their suffering so as to help them. This
Of reminiscences from nearly
By Syed Afsar Sajid
Illustrated & Designed by Babur Saghir
02 - 03
Sunday, 13 February, 2011
‘Most of all, it depicts a society in transition as a result of the war, the struggle for Indian independence and the rising aspirations of Indian Muslims’
T
he author of this memoir Ghulam Fatima Shaikh, though semi-literate, was a staunch advocate of female education. A qualified midwife and nurse, she had a good knowledge of Arabic and Turkish as she lived among Arabs and Turks for many years during World War I. She founded and managed a girls middle school in Hyderabad, Sindh until her death. Rasheeda Husain, Ghulam Fatima Shaikh’s grand-daughter and the translator of this work, is an alumna of the London School of Economics with diverse professional occupations like broadcasting,
librarianship, publicity management, UN consultancies, family planning and woman activism. The ‘foreword’ and ‘afterword’ for the book have been written by Dr Aziz ur Rehman Bughio and Iqbal Akhund respectively. The former (a retired high official of the Press Information Department, Govt. of Pakistan) transcribed the story of the matriarch’s life that she narrated to him over a period of a month in the 1960s while he was serving as tutor to the children of Dr Umar bin Mohammad Daudpota and Khadija Daudpota, her son-in-law and daughter whereas the latter (Pakistan’s former ambassador at the UN) is her grandson. She had no formal education but had an amazing memory. The narrative first appeared in Nai Zindagi, published by the Information Department, Govt. of Sindh and later in the monthlyAdiyoon, Sindhi women’s monthly magazine published by the Sindhi Adabi Society. The book was first published in Sindhi in 1983 by the Sindhi Adabi Society. It has eight chapters including the ‘afterword’. The protagonist of the story Nandni became a
Muslim at the age of five when her father Shaikh Abdal Rahim (formerly Deomal), belonging to a well-to-do Kripalani household of a Hindu Amil family of Sindh, had already converted to Islam. Acharya Kripalani, the president of the Indian National Congress in 1947, was her real paternal uncle. Shaikh Abdal Rahim’s commitment to Islam was unflinching in the face of a dogged opposition from within his erstwhile fraternity; he spent most of his time in preaching Islam. Saikh al Hind Maulana Mahmoodul Hassan, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani and Maulana Ubaidullh Sindhi were his eminent associates. That was the time when large scale conversions of young Sindhi Hindus to Islam unnerved the Hindu community in the province, seriously disturbing its age-long societal patterns. The first chapter of the book deals with such conversions and their impact on the local environment besides the courage and conviction of the narrator’s father who brought many Hindus into the fold of Islam through his preaching. In the next two chapters of the book, the narrator has described the circum-
Title: Footprints in Time – Reminiscences of a Sindhi Matriarch Author: Ghulam Fatima Shaikh Translated from Sindhi & Annotated by: Rasheeda Husain Published by: Ameena Saiyid, Oxford University Press, Karachi Pages:107; Price Rs.525/-
compassion is a much more all-encompassing sentiment which included not only empathy but the drive for changing injustice, inequity and misunderstanding in the world. As part of her talk, she also gave a preview of her book, the “12 Steps”. She observed that she chose this particular number because it was used in Alcoholics Anonymous Handbook and the 12-step programme was commonly used to combat drug addiction and then drew a parallel between how the hate and prejudice that was prevalent in the world today was nothing but our collective addiction. She said that the sense of self of the modern person was dependent on his/her pet prejudices and venting them felt like a rush of blood to the head. A high like that of a drug. But she said that the book was just a starting point to try to incorporate this virtue into one’s lives and she couldn’t stress enough that it was a process and reading the book wouldn’t suddenly transform everybody into an angel replete with love and kindness and a bright shiny halo. She chose to give a peek into Step 7 and Step 12 of the book, the former being about how we edify our ignorance and the latter pertaining to the functioning of the golden rule and its perpetuation of the compassionate individual. She said we live in the information age and have turned into this omniscient society that prides itself on its knowledge whereas in actuality, we know very little. People transformed embarrassing ignorance about history and halfbaked knowledge into hard-nosed elaborately drawn doctrines that then became a crutch for their biases. She said that the Greats like Socrates knew that more knowledge was in believing in the fact about how little we knew. We cannot define our own essence, yet we feel no qualms judging and essentialising entire cultures. This was a very important observation as this intellectual
arrogance is what plagues public discourse everywhere in the world. People are using things that were meant to facilitate understanding (such as the Socratic dialogue) to cleverly argue with each other and the aim of discourse is not to promote tolerance but to be the ‘winner’ in the ‘argument’. Speaking was prioritised over listening and she explained how all religious scriptures were intended to be listened to and understood whereas they were now stuck in interpretive paradigms. She then moved on to the last step which she said explained how the golden rule and the principle of ‘love your enemy’. She again quoted how this spirit of compassion was embodied in all the classical traditions and that exhibited a certain respect for the emotion which is concertedly missing from the modern world. How spirituality was defined in inextricable symbiosis with the spirit of compassion and understanding. She gave some beautiful examples from literature to poignantly illustrate her point that understanding was a rare commodity today. The talk was geared towards a wider audience and was meant to launch the Charter for Compassion in Pakistan. So while I doubt it had any effect on the well-entrenched cynic or the seasoned skeptic, one could not help but appreciate that her point was simple (a little too simple perhaps), yet relevant to the human condition of today. Even those who believe that religion is an obsolete force in a post-modern paradigm cannot deny that the problems of today could be solved without understanding our relation to the historic force of change that religion has been and that there is a need to problematise the simplistic and often ill-founded notions that we have. But that is a discussion for another time and longer print space. Right now, talks like these will have to do to at least get the discussion going, even if at a very elementary level.
Art Review
Female quartet displays diverse range While Government College University has remained in the news quite a lot this whole month, art wise it does not lag behind anyone else too By Mustafa Naqvi inhas Art Gallery GCU held a group show consisting of works by four upcoming artists, namely Kiran Riaz, Nazish Altaf, Maria Ahsan and Marina Aftab. While Kiran and Maria deal in miniature, Nazish’s work is pure print-making to the core, and illustrations are what form the crux
too, abstract quality of the work improvises where the skill is lacking. On the whole the work seems more of a nature that is well enough in conceptual rather than contemporary miniature. Marina Aftab is an illustrator first and foremost. Straight in the face imagery and subtle subjectivity are her tools of trade in each and every piece of her work. Her illustrations revolve around “Peer-e-Kamil (PBUH)”. All the works have their
of Marina Aftab’s work. All four of these young women are recent graduates of the College of Art and Design, the University of Punjab. The work covers from an attempt at understanding and illustrating “Peer-e-Kamil (PBUH)” to the use of nature as the symbol of a family and social body and even the use of fetal forms to symbolise human emotions and logic. Kiran Riaz works with water colors on wasli (traditional miniature paper). Her command over her medium and the level of skill is modest yet contemporary. Colours, textures, smoothness of form are the basis of her work, and the blend forms a whole new body of work in its own sense. Natural textures might be her inspirational roots yet the end result is pretty much different from the source of inspiration. The use of colour is pretty decent
own distinct and respective moods and approach towards the subject matter. Each illustration is an amalgamation of the artist’s own thought process and the writing. In terms of skill, Marina is also capable of producing highly dramatic, eye-catching visuals that are bursting with play of light and dark. Marina’s work has a very sequential feeling to it, relentlessly conveying the passage and jumping from image to image with utmost ease. Also her skill as a visual artist who keeps the same sets of character in repetition without losing their visual appeal is also very good. Sufism, religion, the self and the individual, all are deeply explored and pondered on by Marina. Although not thought provoking, her works are pretty plain yet with a feeling of blending realities. These illustrations give a very mystical,
M
a century ago! stances of her marriage (and thereafter) with Dr Shaikh Shamsuddin, a grandson of Shaikh Ahmad who had himself earlier converted to Islam on her father’s persuasion. At that time she was only fourteen whereas her bridegroomto-be was twenty-one. Dr Shaikh Shamsuddin left for Turkey in the wake of the 1st World War to join the Hilal-e-Ahmer to rescue the sick and injured. The Indian Muslims were anxious to share the sufferings of their Turkish brethren and provide them assistance. Turkey was pitched against powerful adversaries and the Ottoman Empire was in danger of being liquidated. The narrator also followed and joined her husband in Bombay from where they set sail for their new destination. En route, however, they changed their plan in view of the termination of the Balkan Wars, and diverted their journey to Madinah where the couple settled comfortably with some initial setbacks – the austere husband striving to establish his credentials as a physician while the frugal spouse sewing and stitching dresses for sale to ease the domestic economy. In the fourth chapter, the narrator gives a graphic account of the civil life in Madinah under the aegis of the Ottoman rule. She praises the Turks for their sagacity and benevolence. The machinations of the British led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire eventually coinciding with the defeat of the Central Powers in the
War (WWI). The narrator views the inevitable with dismay: ‘With the defeat of Turkey, the Allied powers established separate independent kingdoms. Egypt and Arabia came under British influence, and Syria under French, with the victorious powers installing their own puppets as suzerains. This narrow concept of nationalism, which is against Islam, was propagated by the British to destroy the unity of Muslim power.’ The event had implicit repercussions for the Indian Muslims’ struggle for freedom from the British as according to her they ‘drew their strength from a strong Turkish Empire’. In the following chapter the narrator relates their emigration to and (twelve-month) stay at Adana in Turkey as a sequel to the deteriorating law and order situation in Madinah. She liked the new place and its congenial surroundings albeit the ongoing war. The last two chapters contain an account of the couple’s homeward journey at the end of the war interspersed with details of some family men and matters. The story of Ghulam Fatima therefore depicts, in the words of its translator, ‘a society wherein the measure of man was not his wealth but his learning and respectability, wherein men with great passion abandoned all, and stood steadfast in pursuit of their ideals. But most of all, it depicts a society in transition as a result of the war, the struggle for Indian independence and the rising aspirations of Indian Muslims’.
dreamy feel, with the usage of hue and smooth brush work. Nazish Altaf works much more out of intuition and artist notion rather than practicality, which in her case grants her an edge when it comes to the traditional print-making medium she uses for her works. Most of her work lacking a credible title is tagged “Medley”. Using print-making techniques, Nazish symbolizes the family unit using a nest in her work. The repetition of this element can be seen through out the work, often by using contrasting bright colours. Whereas one piece is blue, the other is a war scene among different shades of violets. Grey, reds and blacks combine together in one certain work of art and greens try to overlap each other making the viewer stay lost in this maze like structure. Maria Ahsan works from both introspective and retrospectives of a particular element. Fetal forms, sperms, stem cells, pollen and dandelion flowers are juxtaposed and re-juxtaposed in all of her five paintings, resulting in a work that is intricate and painstakingly delicate. Her work is a symbolic representation of our homeland which despite so much hindrances, problems and socio-political dilemmas is somewhat sacred to all of us from somewhere deep inside. Overall the exhibition was a pleasant affair and a decent number of students, teachers and artists from all walks of life came together to admire and critique these young artists. One factor which demands attention is the advent of new subjectivity in the works of these fresh minds. Women and art both have moved on, one presumes, from the feminist provoking and modern, post modern bickering affair. It is something more volatile, more fierce and individualistic, something that is very important in redeeming ourselves from the present crisis we as individuals are facing.
the review
Sunday, 13 February, 2011
Y
oung Ashfaq Ali Tabassam is a railway man. And he seems to like his job. When he offered to take my friend Shahid Nadeem and me on a railway journey from Attock to Basal, I was not quite impressed. Now this is the line that branches off from the main line and carries on south to Mianwali. Ashfaq said the line wends its way through some lovely scenery, over dramatic bridges spanning some little and some not so little hill torrents and negotiates several tunnels. For years I had wanted to make just such a trip, but I wanted to go south all the way past the lovely riverside town of Makhad to the point where the Soan River dumps into the Sindhu. There, so my old friend and exrailway man Mian Mumtaz Ahmed had said was that truly impressive span across the Soan. It was not just a minor engineering feat, he had said, but also a right scenic piece of architecture. When Mian was still in the service we together made so many plans to do it, but like all the best laid plans of mice and men this too came to naught. If you went clattering over it in a passenger train, you did not see the bridge. The only way to appreciate it was, as railway men would say, ‘do trolley’ across it. When young Ashfaq offered us the ride, I insisted on going all the way to the Soan bridge. But in the end he prevailed and we opted for the twentyfour-kilometre ride from Kanjur, seven kilometres south of Attock, to Basal. In the event, this turned out to be just as well. Having left Islamabad in predawn darkness, the five of us (Ashfaq had two friends along) arrived at Kanjur just as it began to light up. The motor trolley was already their having been brought out from the Attock city railway station. Ashfaq said the city was skirted because the line passes through some densely built-up areas. When I asked how that made any difference, he was almost circumspect and I found myself wondering if local children pelted passing trolleys with stones, or worse. The worse, being that sub-continental railway lines are the world’s longest toilet. Could it therefore be that Ashfaq did not wish to disturb the male population of Attock town taking their morning dump in the middle of the track? Kanjur is a post-partition railway station. And I judge that from the eucalyptus planted on the premises. When Raj engineers built their railway stations, they planted only indigenous trees and Golra station, to name only one (now a must-see railway museum), is a fine example of this wisdom. The platform is shaded by massive peepul and banyan trees where millions of mynas roost every eve-
ning, their raucous end-of-the-day arguments all but rending the sky above. Kanjur only had eucalyptus, one dead shisham and some poplars. A few kilometres out of Kanjur we paused to admire the bridge over the Nandna stream. Resting on three oblong brick piers with the line sitting about fifteen metres above the stream bed, this was an impressive structure. But although this line was commissioned in the last decade of the 19th century, it finds no mention in the two bibles for railway enthusiasts in Pakistan. Neither Berridge’s Couplings to the Khyber nor Malik’s 100 years of Pakistan Railways have anything to say on its construction. As lines go, this branch, despite its spectacular bridges and tunnels, may not have figured very highly in the scheme of North Western Railway, as it was once known to have missed notice in the two books. But squirreled away in the archives of the Punjab secretariat there are diaries recording the laying of this line. There they are jealously guarded by idiot bureaucrats, fossils from some bygone age, who tell you the two hundred year-old documents are ‘top secret’ and therefore not for public consumption. This first stretch to the Nandna bridge was short and the Potohar cold of the early March had not yet found its way through my tweed jacket. But we rolled on and entered a long section laid in a cutting between two high rock walls. That was when I began to feel the chill and went into what we Punjabis know as the kukkar (rooster) position: mouth clamped shut, shoulders scrunched up, head trying to disappear into the torso and arms tight across the chest. The wretchedness writ large across the face goes without saying. Strangely, no one else seemed to mind the cold as I did. But then, I was the oldest in the group and I now know that as you grow older you feel the cold more and more. Shahid thought it hilarious and as we trundled along he held his little camera at arm’s length taking pictures of me in my discomfiture. I was so miserable I could not tell him to desist and he must have taken at least a couple of dozen shots of a very miserable subject. These images he has several times threatened to send me. Thankfully we drew up to our first tunnel, No. 11. The trolley
river had been dammed to form a lake. It was a right picturesque setting: the rocky gorge already covered with the bright green of sanatha, the blue waters below and above a sky to match. The red girders of the bridge and the grey of its piers provided the counterbalance while unseen birds sang in the thickets. As we pottered about, the picture was completed when a north-bound passenger train went trundling across the bridge, the roll
went strolling in. Shortly thereafter I heard a train’s whistle and saw him running hell for leather back. Behind him the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel really was a train. But on this line that has not been upgraded in a century even express trains go at a crawl and Shahid made it out in good time. This comedy matched my kukkar circus, but would not have shown as well on still images. To get even with Shahid, I would have needed a
hundred metres. If there is another similar arrangement that would surely be on the now defunct Khyber Pass line. West of the platform there stands a building in ruins. Made of dressed stone and brick, this is the old rest house where railway officers on tour once stayed overnight. It fell into disuse years ago and is now decrepit because of a lack of maintenance. In those days there would surely have been that
railwaymen who have worked wonders without getting the sluggish machinery of the accursed PC-1 moving. The case of the Golra Railway Museum established by two good men, Ishfaq Khattak and Hameed Razi, shines. Will there be another like them who will know that the railway system in its entirety is one vast open air museum? We rolled on into Basal – the end of the line for us – making this my shortest railway journey. The
was stopped and we dismounted; I happily, ostensibly to inspect but in reality to get the blood going in my frigid veins again. The pediment at the top of the portal held a plaque inscribed ‘1898’, the year of completion of this tunnel. This was a short tunnel and just beyond was the impressive twopier span across the Shakardara stream. The steel work was identical to the Nandna bridge, but the oblong piers and the abutments were constructed of limestone blocks as against the brickwork of the other one. The placid water was about eight metres below the bridge because, said Ashfaq, the
of its wheels on rail echoing thickly off the surface of the water and filling up the narrow gorge. We passed three more tunnels from No. 10 through No. 8 and while No 10 was completed in 1897, No. 9 in 1896 and the last again in 1897. Since work on this line progressed from the south to the north (as shown by the numbering), I thought this was an anomaly until I realised that No 8 being five hundred and forty-one metres long, several times longer than the others, would naturally have taken more time to build than the shorter No 9. As I stood outside No 9, Shahid
video camera. Jhalar railway station on the far side of No 8 was probably built around the beginning of the 20th century – yet it had, besides several denuded shisham trees, one eucalyptus also. This latter from the years when we thought ‘tree’ meant only and only eucalyptus. Sitting in an oxbow formed by a small stream, the station is noted for having one of the shortest platforms and siding in the country. As well as that, the oxbow warrants a bridge on either side. Though I cannot be certain, but these must be the only two railway bridges in Pakistan that span the same river within the space of a
ancient cook who turned up excellent chicken curry, rice and caramel crème that he insisted on calling egg ‘puteen’ (pudding) – de rigueur in all railway rest houses. But the glory days of Pakistan Railways are behind us. We today operate a mere ghost of what we inherited at the time of our so-called independence and the old tradition of the rest houses has largely been lost. No tears have been shed on the loss of this building in the back of beyond and one day when it crumbles to a heap of dressed stone it will quickly pass out of human memory. Even in recent times there have been some outstanding
Soan bridge that I had so wanted to see was yet a hundred kilometres away. On our trolley it would have taken us the better part of the morning to reach. Perhaps one day when young Ashfaq Ali Tabassam goes touring this line again, his saloon hitched to a freight train, I might get a ride with him. Then he might arrange for the train to be stopped for a while for me to see the bridge that Mian Mumtaz says is one of the grandest. –Salman Rashid is the best rated travel writer and photographer of the country, who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys.
Pictures by the Author
By Salman Rashid
04